Dawn of the White Fang
by Arashi-senpai
Summary: They called him the White Fang. But it wasn't because of the blade he carried. His son will realize the dark past of his father, and the origin of his madness. Lots of ocs, SakuXOc, deranged sense of theme, Ooc, rated M for a reason.
1. Prologue

Dawn of the White Fang:

The Story of Sakumo Hatake~

Prologue

The door to the White Fang's memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens to reveal immense and brightly well-lit spaces, with corridors and chambers that are organized much like a grand museum.

Everywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression.

Spaces devoted to Sakumo Hatake's earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Sakumo himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.

The palace is a construction begun early in Sakumo's student life. In his years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained him for long periods while ANBU denied him his books and scrolls.

Here in the hot darkness of his mind, the latch will be found by a young man. Finding it, he will look neither left or right and elect to the music in the corridors like pirates and sirens. He'll go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most fragmentary.

He'll add to it. He'll add what he's learned elsewhere, in war records and police records, in ANBU files and forensics and the mute postures of the dead. Suzaku Uchiha's letters, recently unearthed, may help him establish the vital statistics of Sakumo, who altered dates freely to confound the authorities and his chroniclers. By those efforts he may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.

That young man will learn that his father was not called the White Fang of Konoha for nothing. -)(-

A/N: Short prologue, and if any of you readers didn't get any of it, too bad XD but seriously, I'm not gonna ruin it by explaining every little thing so just read it, it'll make sense as you keep reading, and I will update at least once a week. So Latez ;)


	2. Chapter 1

Dawn of the White Fang

Chapter One

Kono wa za saisho mo no

Watashi aru rikai

Jikan wa za eko no a ono

Nai no a ki. (1)

1

Jingui Za Kibishii (2) built Hatake Castle in five years, using for labor the ninja soldiers he had captured at the Battle of Hitani (3). On the first day his symbol was carved into the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden and, mouting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of his provender.

About 100 years later Sakumo Hatake, eight years old and heir to his name, stood in the kitchen garden with his little sister Mika and threw bread to the black swans on the black water of the moat. Mika held on to Sakumo's hand to steady herself and missed the moat entirely on several throws. Big koi stirred the lily pads and sent the dragonflies soaring.

Now the Alpha swan came out of the water, stumping toward the children with his short legs, hissing his challenge. The swan had known Sakumo all his life and still he came, his black wings shutting out part of the sky.

"Ohh, Saku!" Mika said and hid behind Sakumo's leg.

Sakumo raised his arms to shoulder height as his father taught him to, his reach augmented with willow branches in his hands. The swan stopped to consider Sakumo's greater wingspan, and retired to the water to feed.

"We go through this every day," Sakumo told the bird. But today was not every day and he wondered where the swans could flee.

Mika in her excitement dropped her bread on the damp ground. When Sakumo stopped to help her, she was pleased to daub mud on his nose with her little star-shaped hand. He daubed a bit of mud on the end of her nose and they laughed at their reflections in the moat.

The children felt three sharp thumps in the ground and the water shivered, blurring their faces. The sound of distant paper bombs exploding rolled across the fields. Sakumo grabbed up his sister and ran for the castle.

The hunting wagon was in the courtyard, hitched to the great draft horse Entei (4). Hiroshi in his ninja-to and the houseman, Nobuyuki, loaded three small trunks into the wagon box. Ryori brought out a lunch.

"Master Hatake-chan, Madame wants you in her room," Ryori said.

Sakumo passed Mika along to Nana and ran up the hollowed steps.

Sakumo loved his mother's room with its many scents, the faces carved in the woodwork, its painted ceiling-Madame (or Lady) Hatake was of the Senju Clan, and she had brought the room with her from Konoha's inner city-village.

She was excited now and her bright metallic blue eyes reflected in the light in sparks. Sakumo held the casket as his mother pressed the lips of a cherub in the molding and a hidden cabinet opened. She scooped her jewels into the casket, and some bundled scrolls and souveneir shuriken; there was not room for them all.

Sakumo thought she looked like the cameo portrait of her grandmother that tumbled into the box.

~Clouds painted on the ceiling. As a baby nursing he blended with the clouds. The feel of the edges of her blouse against his face. The wet nurse too-her gold necklace gleamed like sunlight between prodigious clouds and pressed against his cheek when she held him, she rubbing the mark of the clan on his skin to make it go away before Madame might see it.~

But his father was in the doorway noe, carrying the ledgers and his tanto.

"Akiko, we need to go."

The baby linens were packed in Mika's copper bathtub and Madame put the casket among them. She looked around the room, and took a small painting of Kumo from its tripod on the sideboard, considered a moment, and gave it to Sakumo.

"Take this to Ryori. Take it by the frame." She smiled at him. "Don't smudge the back."

Nobuyuki carried the bathtub out to the wagon in the courtyard, where Mika fretted, uneasy at the stir around her.

Sakumo held Mika up to pat Entei's muzzle. She gave the horse's nose a few squeezes as well to see if it would honk. Sakumo took grain in is hand and trailed it on the ground in the courtyard to make an "M". The pigeons flocked to it, making an "M" in living birds on the ground. Sakumo traced the letter in Mika's palm-she was approaching three years old and he despaired of her ever learning to read. "'M' for Mika!" he said. She ran among the birds laughing and they flew up around her, circling the towers, lighting in the belfry.

Ryori, a big man in kitchen whites, came out carrying a lunch. The horse rolled an eye at Ryori and followed his progress with a rotating ear-when Entei was a colt,Ryori had run him out of the vegetable garden on a number of occasions, yelling oaths and swatting his rump with a staff-like object.

"I'll stay and help you load the kitchen," Kei-sensei said to Ryori.

"Go with the boy," Ryori said.

Count Hatake lifted Mika into the wagon and Sakumo put his arms around her. Count Hatake cupped Sakumo's face in his hand. Surprised by the tingle in his father's hand, Sakumo looked closely into Kino Hatake's face.

"Three squads bombed the rail yards. Captain Sasuke Sarutobi says we have at least a week, if they reach here at all, and then the fighting will be along the main routes. We'll be fine at the lodge."

It was the second day of Operation Ryushutsu, Mandara's lightning sweep across the Land of Wind into the Land of Fire. -)(-

~A/N: (1)- This is the first thing

I have understood:

Time is the echo of an axe

Within a wood.

(2)- Jingui Za Kibishii, trans. Cannibal the Grim.

(3)- Battle of Hitani, trans. Battle of Fire Valley, just a battle I kind of made up to throw in there :P

(4)- Entei, (NOT the legendary pokemon, although that's cool too) a horse in Japanese mythology

Until next time! Latez~


	3. Chapter 2

Dawn of the White Fang,

Chapter 2~

Hiroshi walked ahead of the wagon on the forest path, careful of the horse's face, hacking back the overgrown branches with a long-edged kunai.

Kei-sensei followed on a mare, his saddlebags full of books and jutsu scrolls, most being very rare ones. He was unused to horseback and he hugged the horse's neck to pass beneath the limbs. Ninja don't usually ride horses. Sometimes where the trail was steep, he dismounted to push along with Nobuyuki and Hiroshi and Count Hatake himself. Branches snapped back behind them to close the trail again.

Sakumo smelled greenery crushed by the wheels and Mika's warm hair beneath his chin as she rode on his lap. He watched the ninja invaders from afar run through the trees. Their swift and quick actions made a musical staff and Sakumo hummed to his sister the notes the black flak jackets made in the trees. It was not a satisfying tune.

"No," Mika said. "Saku sing 'Kurai Mori no Saakasu'!" And together they sang about the mysterious little circus in the woods, Nana joining in the swaying wagon and Kei-sensei singing from horseback, though he preferred not to sing so high-pitched.

Mori no ne, oku no oku ni arunda, sono Saakasu Zachou wa, ookina me ni takai se-juu Meetoru

Kyasuto wa minna yukai, katachi wa hen Dakeredo tottemo tanoshiinda! Kurai Mori no Saakasu!

Two hard hours brought them to a clearing beneath the canopy of the high forest.

The hunting lodge had evolved over the three hundred years from a crude shelter into a comfortable forest retreat, half-timbered with a steep roof to shed the snow. There was a small barn containing two stalls and a bunkhouse and, behind the lodge, a Japanese privy with katakana carvings, its roof just visible over the screening hedge.

Still visible in the foundations of the lodge are the stones of an altar built in the Dark Ages by ronin samurai. Also by a people who venerated the grass snake.

Now Sakumo watched a grass snake flee that ancient place as Nobuyuki cut back some vines so Nana could open windows.

Count Hatake ran his hands over the big horse while it drank a gallon and a half from the well bucket. "Ryori will have the kitchen packed by the time you get back, Hiroshi. Entei can rest in his own stall overnight. You and Ryori start back here at first light, no later. I want you well clear of the castle by morning."

Kazuya Kazama entered the courtyard of Hatake Castle with the most pleasant expression, scanning the windows as he came. He waved and called out "Hello!"

Kazuya was a slight figure, with deep brown hair, in civilian clothes, with eyes so pale and blue they looked like discs of the empty sky. He called out "Hello in the house!" When there was no reply he went in the kitchen entrance and found cases of supplies packed on the kitchen floor. Quickly he put tea and shuriken in his pack. The cellar door was open. He looked down the long stairs and saw a light.

Violating another creature's den is the oldest taboo. To certain warps, slipping in offers the freezing feeling of arousal, as it did now.

Kazuya went down the staircase into the cool cave air of the castle's vaulted dungeons. He peered through an arch and saw that the iron gate securing the wine room was open.

A rustling noise. Kazuya could see labeled rice wine racks floor to ceiling filled with bottles and the cook's big shadow moving around the room as he worked by the light of two lanterns. Square wrapped packages were on the tasting table in the center of the room and, with them, a single small painting in an ornate frame.

Kazuya showed his teeth when that big bastard of a cook came into view. Now the cook's wide back was to the door as he worked over the table. A rustling of paper.

Kazuya flattened himself against the wall in the shadow of the steps.

The cook wrapped the painting in paper and wrapped it in the kitchen string, making a parcel like the others. With a lantern in his free hand, he reached up and pulled on an iron chandelier above the tasting table. A click and at the back of the wine cellar one end of a wine rack swung a few inches away from the wall of the room. Ryori swung the rack away from the wall with a groan of hinges. Behind it was a door.

Ryori went into the concealed room behind the wine cellar and hung one of his lanterns back there. Then he carried the parcels inside.

As he was swinging the wine rack closed, his back to the door, Kazuya started up the steps. He heard a shot fired outside, and then the cook's voice below him.

"Who's that!"

Ryori came behind him, fast on the stairs for a big man.

"Stop you! You were never to come here..!"

Kazuya ran though the kitchen and into the courtyard waving and whistling.

Ryori grabbed a stave from the corner and ran across the kitchen toward the courtyard when he saw a silhouette in the doorway, an unmistakable jacket shape, and three Kumo shinobi came into the room. Kazuya was behind them.

"Hi, Cookie," Kazuya said. He picked up a salted ham from the crate on the floor.

"Put back the meat," the Kumo corporal said, pointing at his weapon at Kazuya as readily as he did at the cook. "Get outside, go with the patrol."

The trail was easier decending to the castle, Hiroshi was making good time with the empty wagon, wrapping the reins around his arm while he lit his pipe. As he approached the edge of the forest he thought he saw a big crow taking off from high in a tree. As he got closer he saw the flapping black was fabric, a piece of a uniform caught in high limbs. Hiroshi stopped. He put down his pipe and slid off the wagon. He put his hand over Entei's muzzle and spoke quietly into the horse's ear. Then he moved forward on foot, cautious.

Suspended from a lower limb was a man in rough civilian clothes, newly hanged with the wire noose well into his neck, his face blue-black, his muddy boots above the ground. Hiroshi turned back fast toward the wagon, looking for a place to turn around on the narrow trail, his own boots looking strange to him as he found footing on the rough ground.

They came out of the trees then, three rogue Konoha ninja soldiers under a 'sergeant' and six men in Kumogakure ninja-to, also renegade but more...vicious-looking. The sergeant considered, then drew back the sheath of his katana sword. Hiroshi recognized one of the Kumo soldiers, seeing as that was his home village.

"Kazuya," he said.

"Hiroshi, goody Hiroshi, who always got up his lessons," Kazuya said. He walked up to Hiroshi with a smile that seemed friendly enough.

"He can handle the horse," Kazuya said to the rogue sergeant.

"Maybe he is your friend," the sergeant said.

"Maybe not," Kazuya said, and spit in Hiroshi's face. "I hung the other one, didn't I? I knew him too. Why should we walk?" And softly, "I'll kill him at the castle if you will lend me back my weapons."

A/N: Oh no! Not Another character! Well at least you were sort of warned this time. Ok not really, but it still counts. Kind of. Whatever, next is the action part! Sort of (oh not this again). You know what, you read it next time and decide, until then, Latez! Oh yeah, and here's how the whole Kumo and Konoha rogue soldiers and such goes: Mandara has an army made up of rogue ninja fom different villages. Every two villages has troops destroy and/or capture every land and Kumo and Konoha were to be doing so in the Land of Fire. So there you have it, oh, and some of the first Akatsuki members are in this! So this time for reals, Latez!


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The 2nd Great Ninja War, Madara's lightning war, was faster than anyone imagined. At the castle Nobuyuki found a company of the Fusei na Heishi's **(1) **Head Division, the "Akatsuki". Two groups of soldiers were camped near the moat with mashibi spikes all around and some wagons filled to the brim in arson.

The gardner Ueki lay face-down in the kitchen yard with blowflies on his head.

Nobuyuki saw this from the wagon box. Only the Konoha citizens rode in his wagon. Kazuya and the others had to walk behind. They were only Kumo Borantia, or volunteers that were wandering rogues recruited by Madara.

Nobyuki could see two soldiers, high on a tower of the castle, running down the Hatake's clan symbol pennant and putting up a radio aerial and a red-cloud flag in its place.

A major wearing black and the Akatsuki insignia came out of the castle to look at Entei.

"Very nice, but too wide to ride," he said regretfully-he had brought his 'jodhpurs' and spurs to ride for recreation. The other horse would do. Behind him two Hariken Heishi **(2) **came out of the house, hustling Ryori along between them.

"Where is the family?"

"In Suna, sir," Nobuyuki said. "May I cover Ueki's body?"

The major motioned to his sergeant, who stuck the blade of his kunai under Nobuyuki's chin.

"And who will cover yours? Smell the metal. It's still stained. It can slice your fucking head off too," the major said. "Where is the family?"

Nobuyuki swallowed. "Fled to Suna, sir."

"Are you Hyuuga?"

"No, sir."

"ANBU?"

"No, sir."

He looked at a wad of letters from a desk in the house. "This is mail for a Kei. Are you the former Black Op Kei?"

"A tutor, sir. Sensei. Long gone."

The major checked Nobuyuki's arm for a tattoo. "Show the sergeant your tongue." Then, "Shall I kill you or will you work?"

"Sir, these people all know each other," the sergeant said.

"Is that so? Perhaps they like each other." He turned to Kazuya. "Perhaps your fondness for your landsmen is more than you love us, hm, Borantia?" The major turned to his sergeant. "Do you think we really need any of them?" The sergeant leveled the kunai at Kazuya and his men.

"The cook was an ANBU," Kazuya said. "Here is useful local knowledge-you let him cook for you, you would be dead within the hour from poison." He pushed forward on of his men. "Potto Uotcha* can cook, and forage and soldier too."

Kazuya went to the center of the courtyard, moving slowly, the blade of the sergeant's kunai tracking him. "Major, you wear the ring and the scars of Hitani. Here is military history, of the kind you yourself are making. This is the Ravenstone of Jingui Za Kibishii. Some of the most valiant Shinobi Knights died here. Is it not time to wash the stone with Konoha blood?"

The major raised his eyebrows. "If you want to be Akatsuki, let's see you earn it." He nodded to his sergeant. The sergeant took shuriken from his leg holster and handed it to Kazuya. Two Hariken Heishi dragged the cook to the Ravenstone.

The major seemed more interested in examining the horse. Kazuya held the kunai to the cook's head and waited, as if holding a gun, for the major to watch. Ryori spit on him.

Swallows started from the towers at the slice.

-)(-

Nobuyuki was put to moving furniture for the officers' billet upstairs. He looked to see of he had wet himself. He could hear the radio operator in a small room under both code and voice transmissions in heavy static. The operator ran down the stairs with his pad resorting to the old old-fashion ways of doing this, returning with the small scroll in his hand. He packed the equipment and moved the bird in its cage. They were moving west.

From an upper window Nobuyuki watched the Akatsuki unit passing a backpack radio out of the wagon to the small garrison they were leaving behind. Kazuya and his scruffy civilians, issued bladed weapons now, carried out everything from the kitchen and piled the supplies into the back of the half-track wagon with some support personnel. The troops were waiting patiently in leaping formation. Kazuya ran out of the castle to catch up. The unit moved towards Suna, taking Kazuya and the other Borantias. They seemed to have forgotten Nobuyuki.

A squad of rogue nins with a setup of explosive tags and a messenger hawk were left behind at the castle. Nobuyuki waited in the old tower latrine until dark. The small Kiri garrison all ate in the kitchen, with one sentry posted in the courtyard. They had found some dango in the kitchen cabinet. Nobuyuki came out of the tower latrine, thankful the stone floors did not creak.

He looked into the messenger room. The equipment was all spread out on Madame's dresser, scent bottles pushed off on the floor. Nobuyuki looked at it. He thought about Ueki dead in the kitchen yard and Ryori spitting on Kazuya with his last breath. Nobuyuki slipped into the room. He felt he should apologize to Madame for the intrusion. He came down the stairs in his stocking feet carrying his ninja boots and the two packs of the batteries for the wireless headset and slipped out a sally port. The batteries didn't really make a heavy load, but it was rather bulky and Nobuyuki tried his best to hide it under wraps. He was sorry he could not take the horse.

-)(-

Dusk and firelight glowing on the painted timbers of the hunting lodge, shining in the dusty eyes of trophy animals as the family gathered around the fire-place. The animal heads were old, patted bald years ago by generations of children reaching through the banister of the upper landing.

Nana had Mika's copper bathtub in a corner of the hearth. She added water from a kettle to adjust the temperature, made suds and lowered Mika into the water. The child batted happily at the foam. Nana fetched towels to warm before the fire. Sakumo took Mika's baby bracelet off her wrist, dipped it in the suds and blew bubbles for her through the bracelet. The bubbles, in their brief flight on the draft, reflected all the bright faces before they burst above the fire. Mika liked to grab for the bubbles, but wanted her bracelet back, and was not satisfied until it was on her arm again.

Akiko played a soft tone japanese song on a small piano.

Tiny music, the windows covered with blankets as night fell and the black wings of the forest closed around them. Nobuyuki arrived exhausted and the music stopped. Tears stood in Count Hatake's eyes as he listened to Nobuyuki. Akiko took Nobuyuki's hand and patted it.

-)(-

The black swans flew as high as they could comfortably go, the four black swans in echelon, their necks extended, trying for the south, the shatter of the exploding tags above and below them as dawn broke.

A burst of flak and the lead swan crumpled in mid-stroke and began the long plunge to earth, the other birds turning, calling down the air, losing altitude in great circles. The wounded swan thumped heavily in an open field and did not move. His mate swooped down beside him, poked him with her beak, waddled around him with urgent honks.

He did not move. Another tag burst in the field, and Suna infantry were visible moving in the trees at the edge of the meadow. An Akatsuki Panzer tank** (3) **jumped a ditch and came across the meadow, firing its poisoned senbon into the trees, coming, coming. The swan spread her wings and stood her ground over her mate even though the tank was wider than her wings, its engine loud as her wild heart. The swan stood over her mate hissing, hitting the tank with hard blows of her wings at the last, and the tank rolled over them, oblivious, in its whirring treads a mush of flesh and feathers.

-)(-

**A/N: (1) and (2) Pretty much mean the same thing, it's just different kinds of soldiers. **

**(3): Could not think of anything else to fit with that descriptive paragraph. But hey, they had a tank-type thingie in the first movie, so nnh! :P Anyways, see ya next time! **


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

The Hatake family survived in the woods for the terrible three and a half years of Madara's eastern campaign. The long forest path to the lodge was filled with snow in winter and overgrown in spring, the marshes too soft in summer for tanks.

The lodge was well stocked with flour and sugar to last through the first winter, but most importantly it had salt in casks. In the second winter they came upon a dead and frozen horse. They were able to cut it up with axes and salt the meat. They salted trout as well, and partridges.

Sometimes men in civilian clothes same out of the forest in the night, quiet as the shadows. Count Hatake and Nobuyuki talked with them in Japanese, and once they brough a man with blood soaked through his shirt, who died on a pallet in the corner while Nana was mopping his face.

Every day when the snow was too deep to forage, Kei-sensei gave lessons. He taught English and very bad Chinese, he taught Konoha history with a heavy emphasis on the police core, and everyone attended. He made dramatic tales out of historical events, sometimes embellishing them for his audience beyond the strict bounds of scholarship.

He instructed Sakumo in ninja arts and mathematics privately, as the lessons reached a level inaccessible to the others.

Among Kei-sensei's books and scrolls was a copy bound in leather of Goseki Kojima's _Kozure Ookami_, and Sakumo was fascinated with it, with following the movement of Itto Ogami's mind, feeling him moving towards his goal. He associated the wilderness of the story with the glare of the snow and the shrine windows in the old windowpanes. The elegance of Itto's thought was like the clean and simplified lines of winter, the structure under the leaves. A box opening with a click and inside, a principle that works every time. It was a dependable thrill, and Sakumo had been feeling it since he could read.

Sakumo Hatake could always read, or it seemed that way to Nana. She read to him for a brief period when he was two, often from a Brothers Grimm illustrated with woodcuts where everyone had pointed toenails. He listened to Nana reading, his head lolling against her while he looked at the words on the page, and then she found him at it by himself, pressing his forehead to the book and then pushing up to focal distance, reading aloud in Nana's accent.

Sakumo's father had one salient emotion-curiosity. In his curiosity about his son, Kino Hatake had the houseman pull down the heavy dictionaries in the castle library. English, German, Latin, and the twenty-three volumes of the Japanese dictionary, and then Sakumo was on his own with the books.

When he was six, four important things happened to him.

First he discovered Euclid's _Elements_, in an old edition with hand-drawn illustrations. He could follow the illustrations with his finger, and put his forehead against them.

That fall he became a ninja, his father had granted him the honor after discovering that he had been learning jutsu in secret, practicing techniques in the library and even improving already-made ones.

Also in fall he was presented with a baby sister, Mika. He thought Mika looked like a wrinkled red squirrel. He reflected privately that it was a pity she did not get their mother's looks.

Usurped on all fronts, he thought how convenient it would be if the hawk that sometimes soared over the castle should gather his little sister up and gently transport her to some happy peasant home in a country far away, where the residents all looked like squirrels and she would fit right in. At the same time, he found he loved her in a way he could not help, and when she was old enough to wonder, he wanted to show her things, he wanted her to have the feeling of discovery.

Also in the year Sakumo was six, Count Hatake found his son determining the height of the castle towers by the length of their shadows, following instructions which he said came directly from Euclid himself. Count Hatake improved his tutors then-within six weeks arrived Kei-sensei, a penniless sensei from Kumogakure.

Kino introduced Kei-sensei to his pupil in the library and left them. The library in warm weather had a cold-smoked aroma that was ingrained in the castle's stone.

"My father says you will teach me many things."

"If you wish to learn many things, I can help you."

"He tells me you are a great ninja and a scholar."

"I am a student."

"He told my mother you were expelled from the University."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I am ANBU, leaf-village black ops to be precise."

"I see. Are you unhappy?"

"To be a black op? No, I'm glad."

"I meant are you unhappy to be out of school?"

"I am glad to be here."

"Do you wonder if I am worth your time?"

"Every person is worth your time, Sakumo. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look _into_ him."

"Did they put you in a room with an iron gate over the door?"

"Yes, they did."

"It doesn't lock anymore."

"I was pleased to see that."

"That's where they kept Uncle Tobi*," Sakumo said, aligning his pens in a row before him. "It was a long time ago I suppose, before my time. Look at the windowpane in your room. It has a date he scratched with a diamond into the glass. These are his scrolls."

A row of immense leather tomes occupied an entire shelf. The last one was charred.

"The room will have a smoky smell when it rains. The walls are lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances."

"Did you say his utterances?"

"They were about government, but-do you know the meaning of 'lewd', or 'lewdness'?"

"Yes."

"I'm not clear on it myself, but I believe it means the sort of thing one wouldn't say in front of Mother."

"That's my understanding of it as well," Kei-sensei said.

"If you'll look at the date on the glass, it's exactly the day direct sunlight reaches his window every year."

"He was waiting for the sun."

"Yes, and that's the day he burned up in there. As soon as he got sunlight, he lit the hay with the monocle he wore as he composed these scrolls."

Sakumo further aquainted his tutor with Hatake Castle with a tour of the grounds. They passed through the courtyard, with its big block of stone. A hitching ring was in the stone and, in its flat top, the scars of an axe.

"Your father said you measured the height of the towers."

"Yes."

"How high are they?"

"Forty meters, the south one, and the other is a half-meter shorter."

"What did you use for a gnomon?"

"The stone. By measuring the stone's height and its shadow, and measuring the shadow of the castle at the same hour."

"The side of the stone is not exactly vertical."

"I used my yo-yo as a plumb."

"Could you take both measurements at once?"

"No, Kei-sensei."

"How much error might you have from the time between the shadow measurements?"

"A degree every four minutes as the earth turns. It's called the Ravenstone. Nana calls it the _Reibanstein._ She is forbidden to seat me on it."

"I see," Kei said. "It has a longer shadow than I thought." He knew this boy was sharp, so much that he could grow to be a dangerous shinobi.

But that only increased his curiosity.

They fell into a pattern of having discussions while walking and Sakumo, stumping along beside him, watched his tutor adjust to speaking to someone much shorter. Often Kei turned his head to the side and spoke into the air above Sakumo, as though he had forgotten he was talking with a child. Sakumo wondered if he missed walking and talking with someone his own age.

Sakumo was interested to see how he got along with the houseman, Nobuyuki, and Hiroshi the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind. Sakumo saw that Kei-sensei made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free time, he was teaching them how seal-techniques and how to teleport instantaneously. Kei-sensei took his meals with Ryori, from whom he extracted a certain amount of rusty Mandarin, to the surprise of the family.

The parts of an ancient catapult used by Jingui Za Kibishii against the Shinobi Knights were stored in a barn on the property, and on Sakumo's birthday Kei-sensei, Nobuyuki, and Hiroshi put the catapult together, substituting the stout with new timber for the throwing arm. With it they threw a hogshead of water higher than the castle, it falling to burst with a wonderful explosion of water on the far bank of the moat that sent the wading birds flapping away.

In that week, Sakumo had the keenest single pleasure of his childhood. As a birthday treat Kei-sensei showed him a proof of the chakra concentration jutsu used in weapons, using his own specially made kunai and his fire chakra and fired the blade through a tree and stone block. Sakumo looked at it, walked around it. Kei brushed the splinters off the trunk and raised his eyebrows, asking if Sakumo wanted to see it again. And Sakumo got it. He got it with a rush that felt like he was being launched off the catapult.

Kei-sensei rarely brought scrolls to their discussions, and rarely referred to one. At the age of eight, Sakumo asked him why.

"Would you like to remember everything?" Kei-sensei said.

"Yes."

"To remember is not always a blessing."

"I would like to remember everything."

"Then you will need a mind palace, to store things in. A palace in your mind."

"Does it have to be a palace?"

"It will grow to be enormous like a palace," Kei-sensei said. "So it might as well be beautiful. What is the most beautiful room you know, a place you know very well?"

"My mother's room," Sakumo said.

"Then that's where we will begin," Kei-sensei said.

Twice Sakumo and Kei watched the sun touch Uncle Tobi's window in the spring, but by the third year they were hiding in the woods.

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-x-

***Tobi was short for Tobirama, as you might know him as the Nidaime Hokage. He is also Akiko's father, and where Sakumo's (later Kakashi's) trait of silver hair comes from.**


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

_**Winter, 2nd Great Ninja War**_

When the Eastern Front collapsed, the Kumogakure army rolled like lava across to the Amegakure territory, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, people by the starving and the dead.

From the east and from the south the citizens of the Cloud came, up toward the sea from the 3rd and 2nd Division fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Akatsuki, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Kirigakure.

It was the end of the Borantia's ambitions. After they faithfully killed and pillaged for their Akatsuki masters, murdered Anbu and Foundation members, none of them got to be apart of the organization. They were called cronies, or more like henchmen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death.

But a few deserted and went into business for themselves...

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.

.

A handsome Konoha estate house near the Land of Fire border, open like a dollhouse on one side where a bomb kunai had blown the wall away. The family, flushed from the basement by the first bomb burst and killed by the second, were dead in the groundfloor kitchen. Dead soldiers, Madara's and Leaf, lay in the garden. A Kumo staff wagon was on its side, blown half in two by a bomb.

An Akatsuki major was propped on a divan in front of the living room fireplace, blood frozen on the legs of his trousers. His sergeant pulled a blanket off a bed and put it over him and got a fire going, but the room was open to the sky. He got the major's ninja boot off, although he could already see his toes were black. The sergeant heard a noise outside. He armed his hand with kunai and went to the window.

A medical squad carrying more soldiers, with the International Red Cross symbol adorn their garments, went running past through the gravel path.

Kazuya got through the team first with a white cloth.

"We are Suna. You have wounded? How many are you?"

The sergeant looked over his shoulder. "Medics, major. Will you go with them, sir?" The major nodded.

Kazuya and Korisumaru, a head taller, pulled a stretcher for them.

The sergeant came out to speak to them. "Easy with him, he's hit in the legs. His toes are frozen. Maybe frostbite gangrene. You have a field hospital?"

"Yes, of course, but I can operate here," Kazuya told the sergeant and stabbed him through the chest, moving so fast that dust flew off the uniform. The man's legs collapsed and Kazuya stepped over him through the doorway and stabbed the major through the blanket.

Hiruko, Tadao, and Ginoku piled out of the back of the wagon. They wore a mix of uniforms- Konoha police, Konoha medics, Suna medical corps, International Red Cross-but all wore large medical insignia on their armbands.

There is much bending involved in stripping the dead; the looters grunted and bitched at the effort, scattering papers and wallet photos. The major still lived, and he raised his hand to Hiruko. Hiruko took the wounded man's ring and stuffed it into his pocket.

Kazuya and Korisumaru carried a rolled tapestry out of the house and threw it into their half-track wagon.

They put the canvas stretcher on the ground and tossed onto it jewlery, scrolls, gold ryo.

A tank came out of the woods, a Kumo T-34 in winter camouflage, its cannon, loaded with poison senbon, traversing the field, the machine gunner standing up in the hatch.

A man hiding in a shed behind the farmhouse broke from cover and ran across the field toward the trees, carrying in his arms a jade scroll, leaping over bodies.

The tank's rapid-firing senbon stuttered and the running looter pitched forward, tumbling to fall beside the scroll, his face smashed and the scroll's spindle smashed too; silk parchment spilling in random folds as did the man's blood.

"Grab a body!" Kazuya said.

They threw a corpse on top of the loot on the stretcher. The tank's turret turned toward them. Kazuya waved a white flag and pointed to the medical insignia on the wagon. The tank moved on.

A last look around the house. The major was still alive. He gripped Kazuya's pants leg as he passed. He got his arms around Kazuya's leg and would not let go. Kazuya bent to him, and seized the Akatsuki insignia on his collar.

"We were supposed to get these skulls," he said. "Maybe the maggots can find one in your face." He stabbed the major in the chest. The man let go of Kazuya's pants leg and looked at his own bare finger as though wondering where his Akatsuki ring went.

The half-track wagon bounced across the field, its tracks mushing bodies, and as it reached the woods, the canvas lifted on the back and Kazuya threw the body out.

From above, a screaming dive bomber came after a Kumo tank, dropping his paper bombs like leaflets. Under the cover of the forest canopy, buttoned up in the tank, the crew heard a bomb go off in the trees and splinters and metal rang on the armored hull.

-x-

**A/N: A short chapter, I know, but it was to introduce our bad guys! Aaand that's why it was uploaded...kind've late but kind've early. T-T I'm sorry I PROMISE TO UPDATE MORE **

**'Till Next Time!**


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

"Do you know what today is?" Sakumo asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. "It's the day the sun reaches Uncle Tobi's window."

"What time will it appear?" Kei-sensei asked, as though he didn't know.

"It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty," Sakumo said.

"That was 4 years ago," Kei-sensei said. "Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?"

"Yes."

"But the year is more than 365 days long."

"But, Sensei, this is the year after leap year. So was then, the last time we watched."

"Then does the calendar adjust perfectly, or do we live by gross corrections?"

A thorn popped in the fire.

"I think those are separate questions," Sakumo said.

Kei was pleased, but his response was just another question: "Will the year 2000 be a leap year?"

"No-yes, yes, it will be a leap year."

"But it is divisible by one hundred," Kei-sensei said.

"It's also divisible by four hundred," Sakumo said.

"Exactly so," Kei-sensei said. "It will be the first time the Gregorian rule is applied. Perhaps, on that day, surviving all gross corrections, you will remember our talk. In this strange place." He raised his cup. "Next year in Hatake Castle."

.

.

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Nobuyuki heard it first as he drew water, the roar of an engine in low gear and cracking of branches. He left the bucket on the well and in his haste he came into the lodge without wiping his feet.

A Kumogakure tank, a T-34 in winter camouflage of snow and straw, crashed up the horse trail and into the clearing. Painted on the turret in kanji were _Avenge our Kumo girls and wipe out the rebellious vermin._ Two soldiers in white rode on the back over the radiators. The turret swiveled to point the tank's cannon at the house. A hatch opened and a gunner in hooded winter white stood behind an automatic senbon-gun. The tank commander stood in the other hatch with a big voice. He repeated his message in Japanese and Mandarin, barking over the clatter of the tank engine.

"We want water, we will not harm you or take your food unless a single kunai or attack comes from your house. If we are attacked, every one of you will die. Now come outside. Gunner, lock and load. Private, hand signs at the ready. If you don't see faces by the count of ten, fire." A loud clack as the gun's bolt went back.

Count Hatake stepped outside, the blonde standing straight in the sunshine, his hands visible. "Take the water. We are no harm to you."

The tank commander put his booming voice aside for his quiter one. "Everyone outside where I can see you."

The count and the tank commander looked at each other for a long moment. The tank commander showed his palms. The count showed his palms.

Kino turned to the house. "Come."

When the commander saw the family he said, "The children can stay inside where it's warm." And to his gunner and crew, "Cover them. Watch the upstairs windows. Start the pump. You can smoke."

The machine gunner pushed up his goggles and lit a cigarette. He was no more than a boy, the skin of his face paler around his eyes. He saw Mika peeping around the door facing and smiled at her.

Among the fuel and water drums lashed to the tank was a small pump with a rope starter.

The tank driver snaked a hose with a screen filter down the well and after many pulls on the rope the pump clattered, squealed, and primed itself.

The noise covered the sound of the dive bomber until it was almost on them, the tank's gunner swiveling his muzle around, cranking hard to activate his gun, firing as the bomber's winking kunai stitched the ground. Rounds screamed off the tank, the gunner hit, still firing with his remaining arm.

The bomber's windscreen starred with fractures, the ninja's goggles filled with blood and the dive bomber, still carrying one of it's eggs, hit treetops, plowed into the garden and it's kunai exploded, the shinobi dying instantly on impact.

Sakumo, on the floor of the lodge, Mike partly under him, saw his mother lying in the yard, bloody and her dress on fire.

"Stay here!" to Mika and he ran to his mother, the senbon ammunition in the bomber ninja's backup cannon cooking off now, slow and then faster, needles flying backward striking the snow, flames licking around the remaining paper bomb beneath the wing. The ninja lay sprawled on the snow, dead, his face burned to a death's head in flaming scarf, the tank gunner dead above him.

Nobuyuki alone survived in the yard and he raised a bloody arm to the boy. Then Mika ran to her mother, out into the yard and Nobuyuki tried to reach her and pull her down as she passed, but a cannon round from the flaming 'plane' slammed through him, blood spattering the baby and Mika raised her arms and screamed into the sky. Sakumo heaped snow onto the fire in his mother's clothes, stood up and ran to Mika amid the random shots and carried her into the lodge, into the cellar. The shots outside slowed and stopped as needles melted in the breeches of the cannon. The sky darkened and snow came again, hissing on the hot metal.

Darkness, and snow again. Sakumo among the corpses, how much later he did not know, snow drifting down to dust his mother's eyelashes and her frosty silver hair. She was the only corpse not blackened and crisped. Sakumo tugged at her, but her body was frozen to the ground. He pressed his face against her. Her bosom was frozen hard, her heart silent. He put a napkin over her face and piled snow on her.

Dark shapes moved at the edge of the woods. His torch reflected on wolves' eyes. He shouted at them and waved a shovel. Mika was determined to come out to her mother-he had to choose. He took Mika back inside and left the dead to the dark. Kei-sensei's scroll was undamaged beside his blackened hand until a wolf unraveled it with its fangs, and amid the shreds it licked Kei-sensei's brains off the snow.

Sakumo and Mika heard snuffling and growling outside. Sakumo built up the fire. To cover the noise he tried to get Mika to sing; he sang to her.

She clutched his shirt in her fists.

"_Mori no ne..."_

Snowflakes on the windows. In the corner of a pane, a dark circle appeared, made by the tip of a glove. In the dark circle a dark red eye.

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-x-

**A/N: Now we're finally past the introduction! (yay) and onto the creepy, mean, slightly exciting, conflict!**

**R&R ^^**


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

The door burst open then and Kazuya came in with Hiruko and Korisumaru. Sakumo grabbed a bladed spear from the wall and Kazuya, who had already performed the seals for it, had Mika pinned to the ground with a metal jutsu, his kunai being held steady at her throat.

"Drop it or I'll slit her neck. Do you understand me?"

The looters swarmed Sakumo and Mika then.

The looters in the house, Ginoku outside waved for the half-track wagon to come up, the flashlights slit-eyed and the dim glow picking up wolves' eyes at the edge of the clearing, a wolf dragging something.

The men gathered around Sakumo and his sister at the fire, the fire warming from the looter's clothes a sweetish stink of weeks in the battle field and old blood caked in the treads of their boots, they gathered close. Potto Uotcha caught a small insect emerging from his clothes and popped its head off with his thumbnail.

They coughed on the children. Predator breath, ketosis from their scavenged diet of mostly meat, some scraped from the half-track's wheels, made Mika bury her face in Sakumo's hastily-thrown-on coat. He gathered her inside his coat and felt her heart beating hard. Korisumaru picked up Mika's bowl of rice porridge and wolfed it down himself, getting the last wipe from the bowl on his scarred and webbed fingers. Tadao extended his bowl, but Korisumaru did not give him any.

Tadao was stocky and his eyes took on a shine when he looked at precious metal. He slipped Mika's bracelet off her wrist and put it in his pocket. When Sakumo grabbed at his hand, Ginoku pinched him on the side of the neck and his whole arm went numb.

Distant artillery boomed.

Kazuya said, "If a patrol comes- either side- we're setting up a field hospital here. We saved these little ones and we're protecting their family's stuff in the wagon. Get a Red Cross off the wagon and hang it over the door. Do it now."

"The other two will freeze if you leave them in the wagon," Potto Uotcha said. "They got us by the patrol, they may be useful again."

"Put them in the bunkhouse," Kazuya said. "Lock them in."

"Where would they go?" Ginoku said. "Who would they tell?"

"They can tell you about their sad fucking lives, in Japanese, Ginoku. Get your ass out there and do it."

In the blowing snow, Ginoku lifted two small figures out of the wagon and prodded them toward the barn bunkhouse.

**A/N: Short chapter this time, but I'll upload more . :D**


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Kazuya had a slender chain, freezing against the children's skin as he looped it around their necks. Tadao snapped on he heavy padlocks. Kazuya and Korisumaru chained Sakumo and Mika to the banister on the upper landing of the staircase, where they were out of the way but visible. The one called Potto Uotcha brought them a chamber pot and blanket from a bedroom.

Through the bars of the banister, Sakumo watched them throw the piano stool onto the fire. He tucked Mika's collar underneath the chain to keep it off her neck.

The snow banked high against the lodge, only the upper panes of the windows admitted a grey light. With the snow blowing sideways past the windows and the wind squeal, the lodge was like a great train moving. Sakumo rolled himself and his sister in the landing carpet. Mika's coughs were muffled. Her forehead was hot against Sakumo's cheek. From beneath his coat, he took a crust of stale bread and put it in his mouth. When it was soft, he gave it to her.

Kazuya drove one of his men outside every few hours to shovel the doorway, keeping a path to the well. And once Potto Uotcha took a pan of scraps to the barn.

Snowed in, the time passing in a slow ache. There was no food, and then there was food, Tadao and Hiruko carrying Mika's bathtub to the stove lidded with a plank, which scorched where it overhung the tub, Potto Uotcha feeding the fire with scrolls and wooden salad bowls. With one eye on the stove, Potto Uotcha caught up on his journal and accounts. He piled small items of loot on the table for sorting and counting. In a spidery hand he wrote each man's name at the top of the page in hiragana:

_Kazuya Kazuma_

_Hiruko Asekawa_

_Ginoku Kazama_

_Tadao Akasuna_

And last he wrote his own name, _Retsudo Hoshigaki._

Beneath the names her listed each man's share of the loot-gold jewls, rings, earrings, and gold teeth, which he measured in a stolen silver cup.

Kazuya and Ginoku searched the lodge obsessively, snatching out drawers, tearing the backs of bureaus.

After five days the weather cleared. They all put on snowshoes and walked Sakumo and Mika out to the barn. Sakumo saw a whisp of smoke from the bunkhouse chimney. He looked at Entei's big horseshoe nailed above the door for luck and wondered if the horse was still alive. Kazuya and Korisumaru shoved the children into the barn and locked the door, along with sealing the barn with chakra-enforced barriers. Through the crack between the double doors, Sakumo watched them disappear and fan out into the woods. It was very cold in the barn. Pieces of children's clothing lay wadded in the straw. The door into the bunkhouse was closed but not locked. Sakumo pushed it open. Wrapped in all the blankets off the cots and as close as possible to the small stove was a boy not more than eight years old. He face was dark around his sunken eyes. He wore a mixture of clothing, layer on layer, some of it girl's garments. Sakumo put Mika behind him. The boy shrank away from him.

Sakumo said "Hello." He said it in Japanese, Chinese, English, and Vietnamese. The boy did not reply. Red and swollen chilblains were on his ears and fingers. Over the course of the long, cold day he managed to convey that he was from Kirigakure, but did not speak because his throat hurt badly. He said his name was Hikaru. Sakumo let him feel his pockets for food. He did not let him touch Mika. When Sakumo indicated he and his sister wanted half the blankets the boy did not resist. The young Kirigakure boy started at every sound, his eyes rolling toward the door, and he made chopping motions with his hand.

The looters came back just before sunset. Sakumo heard them and peered through the crack in the double doors of the barn.

They were leading a half-starved little deer, alive and stumbling, a tasseled swag from some looted mansion looped around its neck, an arrow sticking in its side. Hiruko picked up an axe.

"Don't waste the blood," Potto Uotcha said with a cook's authority.

Tadao came running with his bowl, his eyes shining. A cry from the yard and Sakumo covered Mika's ears against the sound of the axe. The Kiri boy cried and gave thanks.

Late in the day when the others had eaten, Potto Uotcha gave the children a bone to gnaw with a little meat and sinnew on it. Sakumo ate a little and chewed up mush for Mika. The juice got away when he transferred it with his fingers, so he gave it to her mouth to mouth. They moved Sakumo and Mika back to the lodge and chained them to the balcoony railing, and left the Kiri boy in the barn alone. Mika was hot with a fever, and Sakumo held her tight under the cold-dust smell of the rug.

The flu dropped them all; the men lay as close to the dying fire as they could get, coughing on one another, Hiruko finding Tadao's comb and sucking the grease from it. The skull of the little deer lay in the dry bathtub, every scrap boiled off of it.

Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Uotcha gave gristle and broth to Sakumo and Mika. He carried nothing to the barn.

The weather would not break, the sky low and granite grey, sounds of the woods hushsed except for the crack and crash of ice-laden boughs.

The food was gone days before the sky cleared. The coughing seemed louder in the bright afternoon after the wind dropped. Kazuya and Hiruko staggered out on snowshoes.

After the length of a fever dream, Sakumo heard them return. A loud argument and scuffling. Through the bars of the banister he saw Kazuya licking a bloody birdskin, throwing it to the others, and they fell on it like dogs. Kazuya's face was smeared with blood and feathers. He turned his bloody face up to the children and he said, "We have to eat or die."

That was the last conscious memory Sakumo Hatake had of the lodge.

Because of a rubber shortage the tank was running on steel road wheels that sent a numbing vibration through the hull and blurred the view of the periscope. It was a big KV-1 going hard along a forest trail in freezing weather, the front moving miles westward with every day of the Akatsuki's retreat. Two infantrymen in winter camouflage rode on the rear deck of the tank, huddled over the radiators, watching for anything. They saw movement in the brush. The tank commander heard the soldiers on top firing, turned the tank toward their target to bring his coaxial machine turret to bear. His magnifying eyepiece showed a boy, a child coming out of the brush, senbon and shuriken kicking up the snow beside him as the soldiers shot from the moving tank. The commander stood up in the hatch and stopped the shooting. They had killed a few children by mistake, the way it happens, and were glad enough not to kill this one.

The soldiers saw a child, thin and pale, with a chain locked around his neck, the end of the chain dragging in an empty loop. When they set him near the radiators and cut the chain off him, pieces of his skin came away in the links. He carried good binoculars in a bag clutched fiercely against his chest. They shook him, asking questions in Japanese, English, and makeshift Madarin, until they realized he could not speak at all.

The soldiers shamed each other into not taking the field glasses from the boy. They gave him half an apple and let him ride behind the turret in the warm breath of the radiators until they reached the Leaf Village.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

An Amegakure motorized unit with a tank and heavy rocket bombs had sheltered at the abandoned Hatake Castle overnight. They were moving before dawn, leaving melted places in the snow of the courtyard with ash trails behind them. One light tank remained at the castle entrance, the motor idling.

Kazuya and his four surviving companions, in their medical uniforms, watched from the woods. It had been four years since Kazuya shot the cook in the castle courtyard, fourteen hours since the looters fled the burning hunting lodge, leaving their dead behind them.

Bombs thudded far away and on the horizon air-bombers arched into the sky.

The last soldier backed out the door, paying out fuse from a reel.

"Hell," Hiruko said. "It's about to rain rocks as big as Iwa itself."

"We're going in there anyway," Kazuya said.

The soldier unreeled the fuse to the bottom of the steps, cut it and squatted at the end.

"The dump's been looted anyway," Ginoku said. "_Hontou no fakku suru_."

"_Kimi wa handan suru kono yo ni?" _Korisumaru said.

"_Watashi shiru kimi ga aru,_" Ginoku said. They had a routine of insulting each other in their native tongue in the tight moments before action. the curses reminded them of pleasant times back home.

The Amegakure shinobi on the steps split the fuse ten centimeters from the end and used his own fire chakra to light it in the split.

"What color's the fuse?" Hiruko asked.

Kazuya had the field glasses. "Dark, I can't tell."

From the woods, they could see the flare of a match on his face as the trooper lit the fuse again.

"Is it orange or is it green?" Hiruko said. "Does it have stripes on it?"

Kazuya did not answer. The soldier walked to the tank, taking his time, laughing as his companions in the tank yelled at him to hurry, the fuse sparking behind him on the snow.

Hiruko was counting under his breath.

As soon as the tank was out of sight, Kazuya and Hiruko ran for the fuse. The fire in the fuse crossing the threshold now as they reached it. They could not make out the stripes until they were close. _Burns at twominutesameter twominutesameter twominutesameter. _Kazuya slashed it in two with his kunai knife.

Hiruko muttered _"fuck the farm" _and charged up the steps and into the castle, following the fuse, looking, looking, for other fuses, other charges. He crossed the great hall toward the tower, following the fuse and saw what he was looking for, the fuse spliced onto a big loop of detonating cord. He came back into the great hall and called out, "It's got a ring main cord. That's the only fuse. You got it." Breeching charges were packed around the base of the tower to destroy it, coordinated by the single loop of detonating cord.

The Amegakure troops had not bothered to close the front door, and their fire still burned on the hearth in the great hall. Graffiti scarred the bare walls and the floor near the fire was littered with droppings and bumwad from their final act in the relative warmth of the castle.

Hiruko, Ginoku, and Tadao searched the upper floors.

Kazuya motioned for Korisumaru to follow him and descended the stairs to the dungeon. The grate across the wine room door hung open, the lock broken.

Kazuya and Korisumaru shared one flare between them. The red beams gleamed off glass shards. The wine room was littered with empty clay bottles, the necks knocked off by nasty drinkers. There was a table that was knocked over by contesting looters, and it lay against the back wall.

"Balls," Korisumaru said. "Not a swig left."

"Help me," Kazuya said. Together they pulled the table away from the wall, crunching glass underfoot. They found the decanting candle behind the table and lit it.

"Now, pull on the chandelier," Kazuya told the taller Korisumaru. "Just give it a tug, straight down."

The wine rack swung away from the back wall. Korisumaru reached for his kunai when it moved. Kazuya went into the chamber behind the wine room. Korisumaru followed him.

"_Kami no naka ni ten!_" Korisumaru exclaimed.

"Get the wagon," Kazuya said.

**A/N: This chapter's sole purpose (pretty much) is to establish 1) what happens to Hatake Castle and 2) Hiruko's catch-phrase, "fuck the farm", which ties in with the castle and our little protagonist...:) Oh, and if the japanese is wrong, please correct me?**

**'till next time! (which is very soon, actually)**


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

_**Hidden Leaf Forest, Land of Fire**_

Sakumo Hatake, thirteen, stood alone on the rubble beneath the moat's embarkment at the former Hatake Castle and threw crusts of bread onto the black water. The kitchen garden, its bounding hedges overgrown, was now the Orushonen Orphanage Cooperative Kitchen Garden, featuring mostly turnips. The moat and its surface were important to him. The moat was constant; on its black surface reflected clouds swept past the crenellated towers of Hatake Castle just as they always had.

Over his orphanage uniform Sakumo now wore the penalty shirt with the painted words NO GAMES in hiragana. Forbidden to play in the orphans' games on the field outside the walls, he did not feel deprived. The game was interrupted when the draft horse Entei and his special jounin driver crossed the field with a load of firewood on the wagon. Entei was glad to see Sakumo when he could visit at the stable, but he did not care for turnips.

Sakumo watched the swans coming across the moat, a pair of black swans that survived the war. Two cygnets accompanied them, still fluffy, one riding on its mother's back, one swimming behind. Three older boys on the embankment above parted a hedge to watch Sakumo and the swans.

The male swan climbed out onto the back to challenge Sakumo.

A fair-haired boy named Taisuke whispered to the others. "Watch that black bastard flap the dummy-he'll knock the shit out of him like he did you when you tried to get the eggs. We'll see if the dummy can cry." Sakumo raised his willow branches and the swan went back into the water.

Disappointed, Taisuke took a slingshot of red innertube rubber out of his shirt and reached into his pocket for a stone. The stone hit the mud at the edge of the moat, spattering Sakumo's legs with mud. Sakumo looked up at Taisuke expressionless and shook his head. The next stone Taisuke shot splashed into the water beside the swimming cygnet, Sakumo raising his branches now, hissing, shooing the swans out of range.

A bell sounded from the castle.

Taisuke and his followers turned, laughing from their fun, and Sakumo stepped out of the hedge swinging a yard of weeds with a big dirt ball on the roots. The dirt ball caught Taisuke hard in the face and Sakumo, a head shorter, charged and shoved him down the steep embankment to the water, teleporting to the stunned boy and had him in the black water, holding him under, driving the slingshot handle again and again into the back of his neck, Sakumo's face curiously blank, only his eyes alive, the edges of his vision red. Sakumo heaved to turn Taisuke over to get to his face. Taisuke's companions scrambled down, did not want to fight in the water, yelling to a monitor for help. First Monitor Zenchou led the others cursing down the bank, spoiled his shiny boots and got mud on his flailing sash.

Evening in the great hall of Hatake Castle, stripped now of its finery and dominated by a big flag with 'fire' in kanji. A hundred boys in uniform, having finished their supper, stood in place at plank tables singing a tuneless song. Headmaster, slightly drunk, directed the singing with his hashi.

First Monitor Zenchou, newly appointed, and Second Monitor in his chunin flak jacket walked among the tables to be sure everyone was singing. Sakumo was not singing. The side of his face was blue and one of his eyes was half-closed. At another table Taisuke watched, a bandage on his neck scrapes on his face. One of his fingers was splinted.

The monitors stopped before Sakumo. Sakumo palmed a senbon under the table.

"Too good to sing with us, Little Master?" First Monitor Zenchou said over the singing. "You're not Little Master here anymore, you're just another orphan, and by kami you'll sing!"

First Monitor swung his gloved hand, the metal plate hitting hard against the side of Sakumo's face. Sakumo did not change his expression. Neither did he sing. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth.

"He's mute," Second Monitor said. "No sense in beating him."

The song ended and First Monitor's voice was loud in the silence.

"For a mute, he can scream well enough at night," he said, and swung with his other hand. Sakumo blocked the blow with the senbon in his fist, the needle digging into First Monitor's knuckles. First Monitor started around the table after him.

"Stop! Do not him him again. I don't want him marked." Headmaster might be drunk, but he ruled. "Sakumo Hatake, report to my office."

Headmaster's office contained an army surplus desk and files and two cots. It was here that the change in the castle's smell struck Sakumo most. Instead of lemon-oil furniture polish and perfume there was the cold stink of piss in the fireplace. The windows were bare, the only remaining ornament the carved woodwork.

"Sakumo, was this your mother's room? It has a sort of feminine feeling." Headmaster was capricious. He could be kind, or cruel when his failures goaded him. His little eyes were red and he was waiting for an answer.

Sakumo nodded.

"It must be hard for you to live in this house."

No response.

Headmaster took a cable from his desk. "Well, you won't be here much longer. Your uncle is coming to take you to Konoha."

**A/N: And now we finally get into the good part. Next chapter features a moment in the dungeon! :D**

**'Till you click 'next chapter'~**


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